New York Markets After Hours

BlackBerry confirms Appstore deal with Amazon

BenDummett

Reuters

BlackBerry Ltd. confirmed a deal Wednesday with Amazon.com Inc. to gain access to the e-commerce giant’s Appstore for mobile devices, a move the Canadian company hopes will boost sales of its latest smartphones.

The partnership is meant to expand BlackBerry’s current offering of games, video, music and other mobile apps to help make its smartphones more appealing to consumers, while allowing it to concentrate on developing security and other apps that appeal to the firm’s targeted corporate and government market as it tries to regain market share.

“We can leverage what [Amazon] can offer,” while providing the Seattle, Wash., company with access to BlackBerry’s customer base, John Chen, BlackBerry’s chief executive, said in an interview.

BlackBerry, Waterloo, Ontario, currently offers about 130,000 apps through its own online store, compared with more than one million each for Apple’s App Store and Google Inc.’s Google Play. Its selection also doesn’t include some of the most popular apps such as Groupon, Netflix, Pinterest and Candy Crush. The Amazon deal addresses these problems to some degree by giving BlackBerry customers access to these apps as part of the more than 240,000 that the Amazon Appstore offers for Android-powered phones, for a total of about 370,000 apps.

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